European Journal of ePractice

PROCURE is an e-service aimed at more than 2,000 public local entities in the region of Burgundy (France) with three key objectives: a) bringing together all public entities for their purchases, b) giving companies, especially small ones, a single entry to all tenders and the capability to respond electronically to them, and c) to be the pilot eGovernment regional project in France.

PROCURE is the first e-service delivered by the e-Bourgogne platform. At the regional level, it has delivered significant results in fostering industry competition, improving the quality of the public purchaser's job and reducing costs. Since the beginning of 2005, 14,000 tenders have been published on the platform leading to 121,000 downloads of RFPs (Request for proposals). By December 2006, the existing service was used by 7,500 companies, among which a large majority of SME's to identify tenders, promote their offers and submit electronic tenders to 1,309 local legal entities (mainly local authorities).

These results explain why Burgundy was granted in 2006 with a European eTEN project, with the objective to evaluate the situation of five other European regions and assess the ways in which this service could be made available to them, responding to their legal, functional and technical requirements. The other regions are Brittany (France), Catalonia (Spain), Uddevalla municipality (Sweden), Central Bohemia (Czech Republic) and Guadeloupe (France overseas region).

Presently, the key action within the Burgundy region is to build the governance model (GIP and PPP ) to bring together more than 2,000 public entities in sharing a common platform (IT/IS infrastructure and eCAMPUS) to run the eProcurement processes and many other eGovernment services to be deployed.